The Beast

An old gypsy woman told my fortune when I was 24. She said she saw a beast, and when she looked at me she shivered. I recall having that effect on others, and it gave me a feeling of power and I took pleasure in that. She described red and white houses on the mountainside crumbling as the ground shook and a river flowing through it muddy red. Blue heads would come from far away but they would just watch and then leave. There was a window with a view of a great city on a vast sea, but it was a cold sea. From that window my future would unfold.

My grandpa had told me stories about life here before I was born. As I grew old older—old enough to read—I began to wonder whether he was telling me the truth. There were dragons and other beasts, and there was fire and loud explosions. The dragons destroyed many houses and churches, and the beasts lived in the houses that remained standing. My parents told him to stop telling me stories or he'd have to leave. I didn't want him to leave, so I never brought up the stories with my parents again.

It was in my last year of law school—my grandpa had passed away many years earlier—that I consulted the Romani woman he'd told me about. I humoured his memory and visited her expecting her to speak in the mysterious way my grandpa had. She didn't disappoint. There were monsters and devastation, but oddly enough she mentioned a land of blond people who lived in perpetual fear of a terrible and cold sea, which she said I would soon see from high in the sky. I thanked her and paid her double her fee, for I had learned from my grandpa to value the old ways, even though I was a modern and didn't believe village superstitions.

One of my first cases was in The Hague, and it was a cold February day when I first saw the defendant. From his dossier that I had read meticulously, I recall a witness reporting having seen him once in Toronto, "a heavyset, silver-haired main in a double-breasted black mink coat waving his arms dismissively at the cars as he crossed the street to the consulate shoving his way through the crowd, scattering men, women, and children as if they were chickens."

The words of my grandpa and the old Romani woman were alive, and now I wondered whether I was up to doing battle in court against this vampire.